How to Fix Your Mindset in 12 Minutes | Trade Expectations for Appreciation

You know, your son got shot in the face, that's difficult. Making a movie is a luxury. It's a gift.

And that may ruin the next hour of your life.

My choices, my moment-to-moment choices are choosing more of a positive perspective.

Rise and shine, it's enspresso time. Good morning, Believe Nation, it's Evan. My one word is believe, and I believe in you. I believe you have an amazing gift inside you that I want to see explode out onto the world. So let's start your day off right together. Grab your coffee and sip on today's message: Put Things in Perspective. Over to you, Denzel Washington.

I wake up every morning, espresso keep me going.

I wake up every morning.

I was a garbage man, like Troy.

Huh?

You get 8 hours worth of work, but you can do it in 3. So you can go home as soon as you finish. Post office, you get 3 hours worth of work and you make it last 8.

I did both.

I liked being a garbage man better. But they weren't bad jobs. It's like, you know, people say, oh, the difficulty of making a movie. I'm like, send your son to Iraq. That's difficult. It's just a movie. It's like, relax. I don't play that precious nonsense. Oh, a movie, oh, get outta here. You know, your son got shot in the face? That's difficult. Making a movie is a luxury. It's a gift. It's an opportunity, and most importantly, it's a gift. Obviously, everybody here is talented enough to do that, but don't get it twisted. It's just a movie. It ain't that big a deal.

Trade your expectations for appreciation. If you want to be happy, if you want to have energy, if you want to stay positive, then one of the best things you can do is trade your expectations for appreciation. If you think about when you're negative, when you're upset, when you're really frustrated, it's usually because what you expected to happen didn't happen. You had these expectations for how long something would take or how somebody would react. They didn't do it. That didn't happen. What you thought in your head was gonna happen didn't, and so you get frustrated. Where if you can flip it and ask yourself when you're in these frustrated moments, how can I trade my expectations for appreciation? That's when you start to get the positive energy coming back. So a couple examples: if you look at waiting for an elevator, this is one that would trigger me. I'm waiting for an elevator, it's not coming. One of the elevators is being used for moving, or it's broken. And you're used to an elevator coming in, whatever, 20 seconds. And if you're there for 40 seconds, you're angry. You're sitting there, you're carrying these groceries, you want that elevator to come. What happened, right? You had an expectation of it coming in 20 seconds, but it actually takes and so you're upset. And that may ruin the next hour of your life. This elevator took so long to get here. Switch it. So you go from trading your expectations for appreciation. So I'll sit there and say, how can I be grateful for this? How can I find some appreciation here? One that I'll think of for the elevator is, there's this magical box that'll take me from parking level 1 to the 13th floor. I don't have to carry these groceries up 13 floors. 14 flights of stairs. I'm really grateful, and all I have to do is wait 40 seconds for this magical box to come and pick me up. We get so triggered and so upset if a website takes 10 seconds to load. We're upset, we're blowing up, we're freaking out. Just imagine, wow, we have this thing called the internet, we have these amazing phones. And that's not to say, listen, we don't want to try to make the world better, right? If you see a problem, you see an opportunity, you want to go and make that better for yourself and for the people around you. But if you're coming from a place of just insane frustration and being upset all the time, that's not going to help you get to where you need to go. And so to solve it in the moment, trade in your expectations for appreciation. There's a good example that Vanessa Van Edwards came up with where she was driving to work every day and she always hit this red light and she got so upset that she always had this red light. For whatever reason, she always hit the red and it bothered her and She just was instantly triggered. She knew it was coming. And so I hit the red light again, I hit it again, and I'm upset. She traded her expectations for appreciation and said, you know what, when I hit that red light, every time I hit that red light, I'm gonna sit and think about 3 things that I'm grateful for. I'm gonna use that as my gratitude practice. Every morning I hit the red light, I think of 3 things I'm grateful for. And so it shifted. Now the red light became an opportunity for her to reflect. And be grateful and be happy and have some positive energy. And then it got to the point where if she didn't hit the red light, she would be upset because she didn't have the chance to sit there and be grateful, right? And so you could turn one of these things that are really negative in your life and make it positive just by trying to find ways to appreciate it and be grateful. So I encourage you to think about in your life, what are the things that frustrate you, that get you really upset, that seem trivial, that seem stupid, but still just trigger you and get you into a negative state, and how can you trade that expectation for some appreciation? Now I've got a special bonus clip for you. Before we get into it, my question of the day for you is, I'm curious, what is that one little thing that triggers you? What is that expectation, and how can you turn it into appreciation? Leave it down in the comments below. I'm really curious to see what you have to say. Thank you guys so much for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. I'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of espresso, and enjoy the bonus.

Another part of what this work does is that when we start to shift our perceptions, when we start to see things with a better perspective, when we start to see our experiences as obstacles turning into opportunities, or a resentment as a divine assignment to forgive more, or a moment of lack as an opportunity to focus on what we're grateful for rather than focus on what we don't have. We start to make these shifts within our life. What begins to happen is that we begin to have more faith in that way of being. And so the neat thing that occurs, and this has been my experience the past 6 years of practicing the life of a spirit junkie, is that now my choices, my moment-to-moment choices, are choosing more of a positive perspective. When there's traffic, my first thought is, "Okay, I welcome the traffic to go away." I start to think about the ways— or if I'm supposed to be late, maybe I'm meant to be there late. Maybe there's something greater coming. Or if something doesn't happen the exact way that I believe it should happen, I know, and my first thought is, there's something way greater coming. So this is just the types of miracles that occur and the ways that your mind begins to shift when you start to practice these principles in your every corner of your life.

My question is, I'm an entrepreneur, it's very great, but not all days are great in a company. So what are your tips and tricks for, you know, tough days?

I think there's massive confusion around entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship sucks. I mean, it's lonely, it's high risk. I mean, I can't live without it. but it's like a bad boyfriend, right, or girlfriend, right? Like, there's a ton of bad days being an entrepreneur. Not to mention 98% of entrepreneurial ventures are gonna fail. So there's gonna be a really bad fucking day in your future. You know, hopefully not for you. Or any of you. You know, for me, I don't, you know, I think this is a very personal question. I think it's how you're wired. I'm so all-in entrepreneur, I prefer the pain. I think one of the reasons I love the Jets so much is 'cause they bring me so much pain. You know, I, I love the climb. To me, the setback is exciting. I love when something goes wrong. It's where I shine the most. But that's not for everybody, right? I mean, it could be very difficult, and when you start affecting your life and your loved ones and all the other things, it can get real nasty. To me, the way I handle things, even the few rare days when I really struggle, I take a real step back and make pretend that somebody called me and told me that my mother or daughter were killed. And I know that's very dark, and I apologize, but it's really what I do. I literally am able to, at my deepest, most struggling moment within business, take a step back and remind myself that I could make a trillion dollars tomorrow on Bitcoin, and if something bad happened to the people I love the most, that it would mean nothing, and it very consistently rewires me very quickly. I just put business in perspective. At the end of the day, you know, it's money. For me, it's not really money, it's my legacy, so I get hurt by it a little bit more. But yeah, I mean, it's, you know, I put it in perspective. It's money. And you know what? Up until I had a daughter, even while I was married, up until when I had Misha, 4 years ago, I secretly wanted to lose all my money. I had this weird, twisted, dark fantasy of losing everything just to rise again like a phoenix and remind you motherfuckers.

13 years ago, you were completely bust, gone, no money. You had £5, you know, $7 left in your hand. You used it for a taxi back to your parents. And your career in the record business had just come to a sudden shuddering halt. And here you are 13 years later, you're worth hundreds of millions of dollars, life's taken a huge turn upwards, but I get the sense with you that what happened to you 13 years ago still defines you now. Yeah, I mean, it wasn't the best of times, but then again, when I look back on it, it wasn't the worst of times, you know, because I think particularly here in Hollywood where where most people get it wrong is they're afraid of losing what they've got. They're just terrified of losing their fame, as you said, power, money. But actually, once you've lost it, you can always get it back again. I mean, it's not the end of the world. I mean, being ill is worse. So because I've actually faced what are most people's worst fears and recovered from it, it's not as bad as you think, you know. I didn't lose my confidence. My friends were still my friends. I've lived with my parents, and I just saw it as a challenge that I've got to get myself back on my feet again. What advice do your parents give you then? Um, they were really, you know, honest to God, they were just cool about it. You know, they were parents, they just, you know, wanted to look after me, live with them for a while. My dad lent me some money to pay the bank, then eventually I managed to pay my dad back. Um, you know, it was, um, what any parent would do. But like I said, it's, um, It wasn't the worst time of my life, and actually when I look back on it now, I still smile because I bought this beat-up old British sports car, worked 18 hours a day, and I was so determined, Piers, just to get it right this time, because I knew why I'd got it wrong. So now I find it much easier to deal with things. If that wasn't the worst time in your life, what was? Well, when my dad died was the worst time in my life, as you know, you and I have discussed that. It was just that, you know, Like getting ill, losing a parent, or losing somebody close to you. That's the worst thing that can ever happen in your life. You know, all the things that I worry about now, just trivial. I mean, you know, even the whole kind of Idol/X Factor thing. I laugh about it because it's such a high-class problem. My show is better than your show. It's like, but we both got a show. It's a bit like Colin Firth and Hugh Grant and the fountain in Bridget Jones. Exactly. Fighting, you know. Exactly. Over what? I mean, the fact that we're here, we can do this. Fantastic.

Raise your standard. Apple, at the core, its core value is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better.

Not one drop of my self-worth depends on your acceptance of me. I don't ever give up. I'd have to be dead or completely incapacitated.

Hey, Believe Nation, if you want to see my all-time favorite top 10 10 Rules of Success, I have a very special secret video for you. These are the individual clips that I have personally learned the most from and applied to my life and my business. Check the link in the description for details.